Kinda OT - Newspapers taking info from MgoBlog

I've noticed recently the trend that local newspapers: Freep, Detnews, and Annarbor.com, are doing less reporting and more stealing info from this site reguarding Michigan football. Just today there is a Detnewsby Angelique that is basically a rip off of the interview Tom did with Dorsey.

Dorsey, speaking to Tom VanHaaren Jr. in an interview for Mgoblog.com, said he's still awaiting official word. A source told The News on Monday that Dorsey had qualified but Michigan will not admit him.

The rest of the article then goes on to basically just rip off the rest of the quotes. There is maybe 100 words of her own writing in the whole thing. The Freep and AnnArbor.com do the same thing.

Why are these people getting paid for this? Brian or Tom write a story - then the News just rips off the information and publishes it. Pretty lame if you ask me. What happened to real reporting and getting your own sources? The decline in the news industry is really sad. If anything the News should just can her and publish the articles on here. It would just skip the middle man.

Look at the mgo.licio.us side bar! It's just links to stories, a lot of them written by newspapers, that have not been written by anyone on this blog. Today ethical blogs cite and link to the sources, and back-in-the-day ethical newspapers cited sources.

I think linking to something is different than getting paid to write and article and just taking it from another site. It gives great credibility to MgoBlog, Brian and Tom - but on the other hand, why is she getting paid to do so? Seems like they should just pay Brian and Tom for their work.

Well, #1, it's *not* linking a website. The articles don't actually link here, which means no one is going to go to the original story and the site won't get the google juice. Also, the story in question uses between 80-90% of the original. Except in cases where the article is so short merely discussing it reveals the total content, we try to leave a reason to click through.

The problem is, they aren't properly citing. They copy/pasted nearly the entire text of the interview without so much as a link (just a mention that it came from Mgoblog). Where I come from, we call that... plagiarism!

sites like this one, in my opinion. And the more it happens, the less you'll hear people like Mitch Albom ask condescending questions of people who are clearly his peers because Brian can say, "We're the ones breaking stories that your citing in your own reporting."

Random: Am I the only one who gets freaked out every time they see him on "The Sports Reporters" by the way his ears look? They're just...a strange mismash of cartilage, and not like a cauliflower ear or something. They look like he pulled them off an alien costume. He smartly partially covers them by his hair often, but still man. Maybe it's hard to see in this pic, but they've always distracted the hell out of me.

I think it would be fine for them to link here, I just think it's odd that she got paid to "write" an article that basically just quotes the whole Tom interview. I mean, I could do her job if all I was required to do is just copy and paste Mgoblog articles.

I'll ditto comments on increasing this site's credibility (and possibly traffic), and add that Angelique's job is simply to get the news to her readers, and if she has to report someone else's reporting, then that's fine. Journalists WANT to break stories--if every Angelique story cited MGoBlog, pretty soon people would just come here first. It's pretty neat that Dorsey opened up his embargo against the media for Tom, and we should feel great for this blog that Tom got the exclusive interview. But an exclusive interview should still be re-reported so that the information can get out there, and Tom shouldn't have to submit a story to every interested news outlet.

Sure, it's a little amusing, perhaps even maddening, to see reporters earning their pay by rehashing someone else's research and writing, but I think that happens a lot. At least this time is was attributed.

In which he basically steals the story, or at least the premise for the story, fluffs it up with a comment from Demar's dad (why would anyone connected with our football program speak to anyone from the Free Press?!?) and supplies NO credit or mention of MGoBlog.

The way Brian tore gaping holes through his and Rosenberg's original "investigation" article, and with people here actively boycotting his employer, I suspect Snyder will avoid giving any credit to this site if he can get away with it.

Is that the Freep and the News have highly-paid "professionals" backed up with resources, both human and financial, that Brian or TomVH or Magnus or FA or Misopogon can only dream about, yet were they the ones to get an interview with DD? Were they the ones to report that DD is attending an alternative high school program? Were they the ones to do the hard work to analyze Michigan's defensive depth and recruiting over the last several years? Are they the ones to give detailed recruiting breakdowns of Michigan's prospects?

No, because that would mean that they would have to work beyond 5pm. They might have to spend a lunch hour making phone calls or perusing recruiting information instead of having lunch at a nice downtown watering hole on the company expense account. They might have to actually work on weekends and weeknights, which is undoubtedly what all these dirty bloggers have to do to get it done in addition to their day jobs. They would have to have a dedication to unearthing facts, and analyzing those facts like those dirty bloggers.

It's the laziness of professional journalists which is so astounding to me, and the fact that it's combined with an openly-expressed disdain and contempt for bloggers who work their fucking asses off in a way that the alleged pros can't even imagine that's so irritating.

A fair question. Part of it is based what a good friend of mine related to me over the years when he worked at the Ann Arbor News. With some few exceptions, his experience was that the reporters there, especially in the sports department, were generally disinclined to arrive early or stay late except for the most unusual of circumstances. it's also based not only on what I see in the sports world, but also in coverage of domestic politics. It's telling to me how many stories of an investigative nature have been initially broken by bloggers as opposed to the AP or NYT or WaPo, and these days I will see new information on blogs days if not weeks before they eventually appear in mainstream media outlets. The story of the firing of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration was broken by TPM's Josh Marshall after weeks of diligent investigative work; it was only after he and the other bloggers at TPM had amassed such a convincing body of evidence that the larger mainstream places started covering the issue. Why is that? If you say that budgets for investigative reporting have been slashed, what is preventing reporters from spending the time on their own to get into important stories? Sure, nobody wants to work for free, but they sure have no problem using Misopogon's hard and unpaid work in their own work.

How is it the case that the Freep can't delve into the defensive recruiting of Michigan and its impact on the team? Are they not interested? It surely can't be for lack of resources, as compared with Misopogon. It's not like Rosenberg and Snyder and the other Freepers are writing long articles for publication each day, and it's not as though what they do publish has been polished to literary perfection, either. Lynn Henning could write what he does in his sleep. Even if they're forced by the Freep or the News to spend part of their day scrubbing the restrooms, you'd think that professionals who are allegedly sports fanatics would find the time to do the work, even if it means having to stay late. I know that for the professionals in the two fields I have direct experience in, graphic design/marketing communications and architecture, the notion of a routine 40-hour week is an absurd fantasy, especially for firm owners.

Could you cut down the size of your astoundingly broad brush a little bit? I know a couple journalists, and they put a lot of effort into their jobs. You're doing to journalists exactly what you don't want people doing to bloggers.

I admit my brush is wide and unfair to those like you know who do take what they do seriously. I believe they're in the minority, based on what I've seen after the last several years of watching the precipitous decline of journalistic standards at local, state, and national levels, to the point where some major news organizations are now trumpeting their new "fact checking" operations, like it's some sort of extra added benefit that we should be grateful for. It's also not the case that journalists in mainstream outlets expect to have their work critiqued or analyzed by their colleagues. Who among the "professional" journalist class wrote even a single sentence of criticism about what Rosenberg did in his hatchet job? Only Jon Chait, from what I have seen. That's a pretty astounding indictment of a profession that is supposedly devoted to the pursuit of fact and truth.

is that saying "[hard-working journalists] are in the minority" isn't even remotely the same as castigating the laziness of professional journalists at large, with no qualification or clarification. It's fine to criticize the bad elements in the msm; just do it carefully and responsibly.

If anything, yes, it further establishes us as the new de facto source for UM information. It also kills the argument that so many people throw in Brian's face about us 'just being some web site.' Pure win for Cook.

The old school media can't hold a candle to the best of the "new school", such as this blog. It's pretty remarkable that major newpapers are relying on blogs as a primary source of info, being scooped by blogs, and being outclassed by blogs by nearly every measurement. The tide is really turning.